Exploiting Raster Maps for Imagery Analysis

The US Air Force seeks innovative technologies to conflate available map data to geospatial imagery. This conflation will allow for supporting imagery analysts as well as automate production in digital terrain database generation facilities. In short, the desired capability should allow the user to generate a conflated, or correlated, data set in an automated fashion. Our proposed solution, ContextMAX offers a grounded and comprehensive approach that utilizes robust image processing and photogrammetric techniques for feature extraction and registration, and visualization techniques for displaying the imagery in its proper geospatial context. ContextMAX includes capabilities to automatically extract features from raster maps, conflate these features as well as additional vector feature data to geospatial imagery, and visualize the conflated dataset using select exploitation tools. We have chosen two exploitation tools being Terrex’s TerraVista software suite and Par Government Solutions Company’s GV 3.0 image exploitation tool. By this, ContextMAX represents an innovative, low-risk solution for improved contextual awareness to the imagery analyst as well as producing modular geospatial data management and extraction techniques useful to a number of remote sensing and geospatial database applications.